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Marc Lewis
I was in San Francisco last week, visiting my brother and revisiting the
years we spent there as young men. We walked through Golden Gate park ,
two guys in their sixties, admiring the giant sequoias, exotic gardens,
and gold-green pastures cascading westward to the ocean. And we
reminisced about our epic acid trip back in 1969, in that very place,
when we were primed for adventure and self-discovery.
There were four of us. We each swallowed our little purple tablets
Happy landing, guys! then started walking westward through the
park. About a half-hour later came surges of energy in our stomachs,
anticipation of something huge about to happen, excitement and fear as
though approaching the brink of an unknown waterfall. The park was so
beautiful. Bird song was everywhere, more nuanced than Id ever
noticed.
And then the world transformed. The patterns of branches, the smell of
the eucalyptus, the hubbub of other people, barking dogs, twittering
birds, blended and disintegrated at the same time. My sense of I
stretched, extending the boundaries of my perception like an unfurling
bouquet. I lost track of who I was, where I was, where I stopped and the
outside word began and then all that disintegrating, reconverging and
reshuffling somehow collapsed into a sonorous oneness, the deafening
drone of an utterly peaceful universe.
Was this just idealistic folly, drug fever? Did we have our heads up our
butts, imagining ultimate beauty because we were so completely in the
dark, so expertly narcissistic, so uninspired by the challenges that our
parents and figureheads wished us to face?
Though that might overstate his case, we can forgive Nutt his
enthusiasm: the findings are indeed extraordinary. Healthy volunteers
were injected with LSD while lying in an MRI scanner, and subjected to
several other neuroimaging methods at the same time. This amounted to an
arsenal of measurement that previous decades of psychedelic researchers
could only dream of. It wasnt Golden Gate park to be sure, but lying
in that magnetic chamber, with their eyes closed and their brains open,
with streams of numbers spilling from their lobes into data files soon
to be translated into images, these individuals watched LSDs intricate
hallucinations unfold behind their eyelids. And at the same time they
reported experiences of ego dissolution very much like those we
experienced in the park.
What was most remarkable about the research is that the degree of ego
dissolution reported by the participants correlated with a specific
neural transformation. To get through the pragmatics of day-to-day life
and the demands of survival, brain activity naturally differentiates
itself into several distinct networks, each responsible for a particular
cognitive function.
Now most parts of the brain were communicating with most other parts of
the brain. Concrete sensory experiences, like vision, intermingled with
cognitive abstraction, and cognitive abstractions reshaped visual
imagery. Perhaps thats what explains the intricate fractal elaboration
that people see in the branches of a bush while tripping on acid. The
perception of salience and refinement of a sense of self are hashed
together like potatoes and gravy. The brains and their owners no longer
distinguish between what is most important, how to get stuff done, and
who in fact is the arbiter of the importance of the stuff that needs to
be done.
Religion v psychedelics
Some thousands of years ago, the Buddha defined human personality as the
recursive cycling of habits habits of acquisition, of craving and
grasping. They led to the pursuit pleasures that were sure to fade and
the avoidance of suffering that could not be avoided in a cycle of life,
ageing, and death. In response, his followers chose asceticism, the
practice of over-control. From the Buddhist monks who stripped
themselves of comfort and the Hindu sadhus with their rituals of self-
mortification evolved new religions.
There came endless lists of edicts that Jews, Muslims, and Christians
still impose on themselves: what one was not allowed to do, on which
days, with what consequences if one failed. Our attempts to wrest
freedom from habit, universality from local custom, truth from delusion,
have generally amounted to a set of rules to increase control, to
partition and segregate, to fashion hierarchies and obey codes.
It seems that our brains, with their intrinsic tendency to parse and
segregate, were well designed to veer toward over-control in response to
the hardships of existence. Or, more accurately, we came by our tendency
toward over-control because it manifests a key principle of brain
design.
Not all drugs are created equal, and I would never encourage anyone to
soothe their existential discomfort with heroin or amphetamine, both of
which I have taken. But psychedelics have a value I cant help but
admire. And now we understand more about how they do what they do. A
simple code unlocks the gates in our brains, gates that normally act as
walls.